Bush administration “Un-American”?!

Discussing on MSNBC Thursday night his latest screed for Time magazine (“The Bush Administration’s Most Despicable Act”), Joe Klein maligned the Bush-Cheney administration, telling 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue host David Shuster: “I think this has been a profoundly un-American administration.” Klein, whose piece for the January 19 edition of the magazine contended Vice President Dick Cheney and other officials “perpetrated what many legal scholars consider to be war crimes,” lamented on MSNBC that “it’s going to be very hard to prosecute these people” but, he ruminated about “the fanciful idea” that “it might happen overseas” with “Cheney being snatched mid-stream while, you know, fly fishing in Norway as Augusto Pinochet, the dictator in Chile, was.”

In the magazine harangue posted Thursday, Klein argued that Bush “led directly to the abuses” of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo “when he signed a memorandum stating that the Third Geneva Convention — the one regarding the treatment of enemy prisoners taken in wartime — did not apply to members of al-Qaeda or the Taliban.” He declared: “It was his single most callous and despicable act. It stands at the heart of the national embarrassment that was his presidency.”